Hi Lennert et. al., > Will the hardware do just switching, or also routing? Does > the hardware have some kind of built-in ethernet address table? > Inhowfar is the chip programmable, i.e., can you upload code > into it?
The chip is just a Layer 2 switching chip. It has an built-in ethernet address table, which will be maintained in hardware. Software can only send and receive packets (on every individual port), read statistic counters and configure ports and the switching engine. The port states supported by the hardware match the Spanning Tree port states so that the spanning tree protocol can be easily adopted to the hardware. There is no firmware on that hardware so there is no upload/download functionality. So the really fast data path is achieved in hardware, wheras the slocw configuration and maintanace must be done in software. Regards, Georg > > On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 04:14:31PM +0200, Georg Klug wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > I am planning to implement a device driver for a switch > > chip in Linux. It supports more than 20 ethernet ports. > > Currently I am thinking of a concept how this could fit > > correctly in the Linux network architecture. > > The simliest way would possibly be to export all the > > ports as individual device nodes (eth0 to eth23) and let > > the current bridge run ontop of theses nodes. But still > > there would be some work to do: > > - disable somehow the forwarding (since this is done > > already in the hardware) > > - do some hardware related stuff on port states chnages. > > > > Any comments? Am I thinking towards the correct direction? > > Thanks in advance, > > Georg Klug > > _______________________________________________ > > Bridge mailing list > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/bridge _______________________________________________ Bridge mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/bridge
